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But it still makes me feel small. Insignificant.
I’m thin because humans don’t usually fare too well in captivity. We need joy and sunlight and hope to thrive. None of which are available in the McAllister household. And I have a feeling the Sokolov estate is even bleaker.
By the time I get to the bathroom, I’m shaking with adrenaline and fear and anger.So much anger.
At first, I wanted them all to ignore me. Now, the way they talk around me, planning my future, arranging when I’ll have children… It makes me sick.
I don’t know how much more of it I can take.
I take a moment to pee—I really did have to go after three cups of water—before I pull the phone out of my pocket and finally dare to look at it.
There’s a text message from an unknown number.
It’s me. Use this phone if you need it. I’m here.
Ivan. He smuggled a cell phone to me through another one of the maids. But he’s never felt farther away.
Before I can decide what to text back, there’s a knock on the door. I lock the screen and shove the phone in my pocket.
“Hello?” I call.
“Just checking on you,” my mother says softly through the door. “We’re waiting on you for the next course.”
I haven’t been gone for more than ninety seconds. Was she listening to my flow from the outside of the door?She finished peeing and flushed, so only twenty more seconds for washing hands, which means…
I want to cling to the promises Ivan has made me. I want to believe that he is coming for me and that this will all end.
But that’s hard when my world is no bigger than this beige half-bath. As much as I want to deny it,thisfeels like my future.
Not Ivan, but Mikhail.
Not hope, but hate.
Not love, but fear and pain and being forced to give birth to a new generation of people who will grow up in this toxic cycle and suck me dry from the womb and then drop-kick me into an early grave.
I blink back tears and open the bathroom door.
29
IVAN
The audio is coming through crystal clear.
When Cora left the restaurant, the necklace was shoved in her pocket. Everything was muffled and unintelligible. But she must have figured out how to display the necklace without raising eyebrows. Because I can hear every word.
Every disgusting, horrendous word.
Konstantin Sokolov hasn’t changed a bit since he and my father arranged for me to marry Katerina. “The goal of any marriage is healthy offspring,” he’d said, gesturing to his barely twenty-year-old daughter. “No woman will give you higher quality babies than Katerina. She’s ready for this.”
Of course, Katerina wasn’t ready for it. For any of it.
She ran away the same way Cora tried to. She started over.
The difference is that Katerina is still free. Without his prized offspring, Konstantin has set his sights on Cora. She is his only hope to have heirs. Because no one in their right mind would marry Mikhail Sokolov.
And Konstantin knows it.
“The wedding should happen as soon as propriety allows.” It takes me a second to realize that is Konstantin’s voice in the present and not from my memories.
